Friday, July 16, 2010

1. Long article about Dodgers owners Frank and Jamie McCourt and their divorce proceedings. Here's how Frank managed to buy the Dodgers:

In 2004, Frank used that Boston parking lot to buy the Dodgers from Murdoch's News Corp., which was losing an estimated $30 million to $60 million a year on the team and was desperate to sell. McCourt secured a staggering $421 million in loans to make the deal, including one for $200 million from News Corp. itself, using the parking lot, then worth $125 million, as collateral. When McCourt failed to fully repay the loan by 2006, News Corp. took the property and resold it for $203.7 million.

3. Read this story about a man who cheated to win on The Price Is Right and decide whether you believe his version of events. It's full of interesting trivia about the show such as:

The Price Is Right pays out of pocket for most of the prizes that it gives away, and the prize budget is fixed. If it's been giving away too many cars especially, it'll pull out some of the harder pricing games, Range Game or That's Too Much, to balance the books. They're not rigged, but they rely on the natural tendency of most contestants to guess somewhere in the middle. In the first instance, contestants almost always stop the game too early; in the second, they almost always stop it too late. The further the producers push the prices toward the extremes of possibility, the less likely someone will win.